Each December, hundreds of thousands of diaspora Nigerians and Ghanaians travel to their ancestral home countries. For many, the draw is the end-of-year party season – better known as “Detty December”, a phrase popularised by Nigerian singer Mr Eazi in the late 2010s. This wave of travel used to simply be a time for diasporans to reunite with their families for Christmas, but in recent years it has evolved, with young people – who call themselves IJGBs (I Just Got Back) – making the most of the buzzing nightlife in cultural capitals Lagos and Accra.
This annual diaspora homecoming is now being fictionalised in The Full Picture by Canadian author Jessica Carmichael, a YA coming-of-age romance bringing the family reunions, festivities, and endless traffic of December to life on the page. The novel follows Robyn, a Canadian university student, who travels to Ghana during winter break for the first time since her Ghanaian mum died. On her trip, she uncovers family secrets and finds herself in a love triangle with Osei, her grandmother’s neighbour, and Kelvin, Osei’s childhood friend. The book was published by Hibiscus Press, which Carmichael founded herself with funding support from Edmonton Arts Council.
‘I wanted to write a story that made people feel as if they were back there’ … Jessica Carmichael. Photograph: Arinze Areh
Like her protagonist, Carmichael is a Canadian of Ghanaian and Bajan descent. Growing up in Canada, she did not see YA fiction with characters that looked like her, and the African fiction she came across often tended to be more serious – so she wanted to represent young Africans in a light yet thoughtful way.
Her novel isn’t the first fiction to explore the Detty December phenomenon; a Nigerian publication, Noisy Streetss, has published short story anthologies on “Love in Detty December”. But in The Full Picture, Carmichael captures Detty December in Ghana in longform fiction from the perspective of a diasporan travelling home. “It is something that you don’t really see in fiction,” says Carmichael, adding that she would “love to see more”.
Carmichael points out that there is scope for Detty December fiction to be explored from other cultural perspectives, given that people from the world over travel to west Africa in December. She would love to see stories “from a Black American perspective, from a Caribbean perspective”.
It was after visiting Ghana for the first time in 2019 to see her grandmother that Carmichael was inspired to write her novel. At the time, it was the Year of the Return, a government initiative that invited the Black diaspora to visit Ghana to commemorate 400 years since the arrival of the first recorded enslaved Africans in Virginia. Carmichael says the trip “changed the trajectory of my life”.
On her return to Canada, she read a lot of Ghanaian fiction that brought her closer to her culture, and later decided she wanted to write a novel herself. Her book features all the hallmarks of Detty December, from the vibrant nightlife to the inflated prices and different diasporas coming together to reconnect with their cultures. “I felt that there was a massive gap in the market, and I wanted to write a story that could make people feel as if they were back there when reading it,” she says.
Carmichael sees her novel as a departure from other writing on diasporic travel and migration. She had noticed a trope of disillusionment and alienation from the culture in books on diasporans travelling home. Visiting Ghana herself, Carmichael’s experience was very different – she felt embraced and welcomed by the local community.
Carmichael hopes her book – which has found fans on TikTok – will inspire more people to write about Detty December. “I’m all for it, because you go for maybe three, four weeks and you come home and you’re back to regular life. So I think it would be amazing to relive it in fiction.”
