Sonnet L'Abbé addresses the topic of beauty:
"Beauty was politicized for me long before I had the sense that through the art of writing, I might address that politicization. I spent my young years in prairie provinces, and after ten grew up in Kitchener, Ontario. Until I hit high school was the only non-white child in every one of my classes. We were all about seven years old, in Calgary, when my classmates began informing me that I was ugly. The message intensified when we moved to Manitoba. A change was occurring in us: we were beginning to see the world the way those around us saw it. Boy and girl were suddenly categories to be rigidly policed; so were pretty and ugly. 'Beautiful,' like pretty, went with a certain kind of girl, and in the late ’70s, early ’80s, that girl, for my school 'friends,' was white."
