“Then, not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it had been […] as I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her[…] When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face […] we stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass” (Rhys, 27).

In the opening pages of Wide Sargasso Sea, readers are presented with an interesting nuclear family that is positioned as the Other within a native culture. The now-called Mason family represents the intersection between native and colonizer and, more specifically, the descendants of this union. Due to their ambivalent precariousness the family finds itself the center of hatred of the Coulibri natives. The penultimate scene expressing this disdain consisted of the native peoples burning the Mason family home. In this scene one witnesses the exilation of ambivalence and the disconnecting of young Antoinette’s ties to her homeland all under the guise of an unfortunate ending of she and Tia’s friendship.
In a sense, one can say that scene demarcates the phenomenon of Brent Hayes Edwards’ decalage. In his essay “The Uses of Diaspora” he states that “Décalage indicates the reestablishment of a prior unevenness or diversity; it alludes to the taking away of something that was added in the first place, something artificial…” (Edwards, 65). That is to say, that the forced extermination of the Creole/White Mason family restored the space to complete nativity. It allowed the natives to remove, what one could call, the artificiality of the creole blood line. Moreover, to an extent, the colonial interjection into this town caused a disruption of the natural diversity of the island and “propped or wedged” it upon the slave trade. Thus, by removing the colonial presence from this house, it could be said that the natives were now engaging in a performative decalage.
Moreover, it may be said that the decalage extends to the removal of the phantasmic blindfold that had shielded Antoinette to her creole privilege dissipated by the throwing of the jagged stone. In fact, Stuart Hall may interpret Antoinette’s recognition as her and Tia as mirrored representations of the same person to be an example of her self-identity as a process. In his essay “Cultural Identity, and Diaspora” he states that “diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (Hall, 235). Here one sees that Antoinette, who at once opposed herself to Tia in an degrading attempt to mark Tia as her inferior counterpart, has reinvented her own identity. It is interesting to see that in the very instance of extreme difference between the native and the meso-colonizer they are at once unified in their ability to understand the precarious nature of the other. Antoinette in this moment is able to finally and completely identify with Tia and the same can be said of the tearful Tia as conjoined to Antoinette.