Jacques's Photos --- Cleo in Anjuna circa 1976
I suppose shambho is a bit like saying shalom or salaam, except its a freak culture thing. Much like Bom Shankar, which is turns out is adapted from Boom Shankar, spoken aloud my sadhus as they pass the chillum around. The Goa Freaks adapted it as they passed around whatever was being passed around.
I got this bit of historical trivia from Cleo Odzer’s hippie accounts in her 1995 book, Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India, an account of Odzer’s five years in India, most of them spent in the fog of coke and smack addiction on Anjuna beach in Goa. The book is clearly Odzer’s own account of her life and her experiences in Goa – the title itself suggests this, but it’s difficult not to understand her account of Goa’s Freaks as representative of the entire culture of hippidom in Goa.
This is not your classic hippie tale. Cleo’s version of Anjuna is a zone infested with troubled young druggies with a penchant for making pots of money as drug runners. I find it hard to believe that through all her highs and lows, her trips and her going Coke Amuck, she would remember with such clarity the detail of each conversation she had at the time.
No wonder there is some unhappiness in the ranks of the Goa freaks, many of whom don’t think the portrayal of either the lifestyle of the folks in it was entirely accurate. Well, to be fair to Odzer she is writing her account of her experience and she isn’t pretending to be taking an unbiased, academic look.
But few people come off looking good or terribly fascinating in Ozder’s account, which is at its best a great contribution to our understanding of a certain part of a particular culture of the 70s. The hippie communes of Ibiza, Kathmandu and Goa have often been talked and written about but rarely by an insider.
After reading the book I felt sort of indifferent. I tried to conjure up the Anjuna of yore, and tried to imagine the lifestyle, the places, the mannerisms. I started reading about Cleo and found myself interested, even intrigued but after some 200 pages it becomes a little difficult to fully appreciate the tour guide.
What’s so fascinating about Goa for Cleo? Freedom to live whatever life she wants, the freedom to run around carefree, an escape from New York, and no doubt, her mother, and the freedom to indulge. Goa is nothing more than the location that allows all of these desires can happen. We learn precious little about the culture, the people or the place, and in a sense India, or even Goa Dourada, is irrelevant. Why does Cleo love Goa? Not for its unique culture that Graham Greene found so intruiging, not for its blend of religious and cultural traditions that have fascinated, intrigued or troubled people, not for its cuisine, and not for its sosegado. Neo-colonialists is a word that occurs to be, although that’s not entirely fair since the Goa Freaks were not interested in land or in acquisition of much apart from drugs (except of course Cleo and her fascination for a house that she could love and adorn). Still, the mentality doesn’t seem that much different and does resemble the culture of settlers in a native land. (Thank you Mamdani!).
Here’s a few choice sentences from the book, which don’t sound much like the writings of a PhD.:
“Their business, which sonsited of transporting hashish down from Nepal and Afghanistan into India and then to Europe, kept them in Goa – that and the fact that no police distrubed them there.” (p. 150)
“I never used the stove, especially with Goans around to do those chores.” (p. 123)
“Though everybody knew the Sikhs sold drugs, “purists” refused to deal with Indians and preferred to buy from their own kind.” (p. 325)
“A Western doing housework! What an unheard-of thing in that land of cheap labor.” (p 325)
“Indians never saw each other naked. They never even looked at their own bodies. When they washed themselves, they kept clothes on and wahed around this and around that.” (p. 306)
“Nothing that the crazy foreigners did surprised them anymore, but we were always good entertainment.” (I bet) — p. 164
I could go on but I think one gets the point. One other little tidbit from an email exchange with a friend, Fran much later in 1999 when she is talking about repaying her landlord, Lino in some fashion for not paying 2 years of rent in the 70s! She purchases a computer for his son as compensation, unable to give money because she doesn’t have cash and the modus operandi by 1999 is credit card maximization, then run.
“The Goans cannot understand the concept of credit cards. I can’t get it through Lino’s or his Dragon bitch lady wife’s heads that just because I can buy an expensive computer doesn’t mean that I have CASH. They don’t get it.”
I mean, hello, the western world took 200 effing years to industrialize.
Cleo says she loves to travel hopping from Kathmandu to Bangkok to Seoul to Moscow en route to other locations ferrying kilos of maal. But strangely her obsession with freak culture means she explores nothing of the local culture, and lacks any curiosity. If the real Cleo Odzer was different, so be it. But as someone reading her book, I can only go by what I’ve read.
When I read Goa Freaks, I had a sense of gratitude to Cleo. I felt that she had opened her heart and soul, and she had written selflessly about her own experiences in life leaving her open to this sort of dissection. But as it turns out other Goa Freaks don’t agree. The most poignant critique has come from Egyptian Serge, the kohl wearing exotic lover whose presence in Cleo’s life is a comfort, even as he floats in an out of her book. This is what he writes in a letter to one of Cleo’s friends:
Hi Krannie
Sorry for the delay in replying to your mail, I have been very busy with
finishing writing up and submitting my PhD thesis. I do remember you and
spending a night at your appartment in NY in the mid 80s. I hope you are well,
healthy, wealthy and wise. Thank you for forwarding Little Lisa’s mail, I have
since contacted her and reconnected her with a few dozen old “Goa Freaks”.
I don’t think Cleo came to Goa with the intention of writing the book. I
actually first met her in Amsterdam before she went to Goa for the first time,
probably in 73 or 74, though I had been living in Goa since 70. And yes, I have
read her other books which, while marginally more authentic, did not strike me
as brilliant. I stayed with her on occasion in Bangkok while she wrote Patpong
Sisters, and she came to visit me in Bora Bora (where I was living) during those
years.
I want to assure you that having been deeply in love with Cleo for some years, I
bear no animosity towards her, and the years have faded any lovers’ quarrels
that may have outlived our relationship, so what I am about to tell you about
“Goa Freaks” is not in any way clouded by residual hostility: the book is a
fake!
It bears very little resemblance to the actual facts surrounding the evolution
of the hippy community in Goa in the 70s, as almost all of us who have read it
will agree. While it portrays Cleo as central to the fast lane in Anjuna at the
time, she was actually living very much on the periphery, with very few friends,
and actually had no idea what was really going on there at the time. And for a
very good reason: as a junky, she was closeted up in a stoned stupor most of the
time and only interracted with a dozen or so other junkies (out of over a
thousand hippies), themselves unaware, uninvolved, and uninterested in the
evolution of the hippy dream. Sure, she new a lot of names, and met quite a few
people in the few years she was there, but there are people who lived in Goa for
25 years and never heard of Cleo until the book was published.
The events, moods, ideologies she describes relate to only a tiny minority of
those in Goa at the time, are often inaccurate, non-representative, subjective,
and even in some cases outright lies.
I am sorry to burst the bubble of the group of devotees who populate your Yahoo
Group, but if you find any other old Goans willing to talk about Cleo you will
hear very much the same narrative I am elaborating here, which is why I am
addressing this to you personally and not to the group. Most people in Goa who
did know her did not like her, and many seriously disliked her. When she wrote
the book, this situation only got worse. Not only because of the gross
inaccuracies and misrepresentations, but because she, typically and selfishly,
asked no one’s permission to describe events that could put people in real
danger, even when she used their real names.
I will stop here, as I feel it is unfair to criticise someone who is unable to
defend themselves, however if you choose to stop communicating with me now I
will understand. You say you are planning a trip to Goa; there are no physical
dangers involved. The place is now a trendy, upmarket tourist destination, and
bears no relation whatsover to the Goa of the 70s, so if you want to “absorb the
place she loved so much” you will be in the wrong place.
Much luck to you Krannie in your travels and
Love and Peace
Serge
Actually its quite helpful to read Serge’s letter because if anything it places the book in context. This is one person’s account out of a closeted experience. There were 1,000 other hippies in Goa, and many of them, I imagine, lived out their lives quite differently.
Goa Freaks is a great window into a world but it probably does a bit of a disservice to a culture that is known only by way of stereotype and hearsay. For the thousands of others who lived in Anjuna, Goa may have meant a little more than just sun, sand and drugs. Don’t know. It’s a thought.
One other thought. At several points in the book, I thought I was catching on to strains of irony, and I thought wow — this is more than just a dispassionate account of every detail in Cleo’s Goa life, including her obsession with her house. No doubt she was generous – generous with her drugs, generous with her house, generous with sharing with the Goa Freaks community. Cleo disliked her mother, and the portrait she paints of her mother certainly shows she was neglected as a child, by a mother who was self-obsessed. Funnily, much as Cleo would likely cringe at this, I found myself seeing some similarities between the mother described and Cleo in the book.
Read the tour she gives Narayan of her new home on p. 238 to see if you agree.
I have to say that I liked Cleo while I read the book- even if I was annoyed with her and by her at several points. She seemed disarming, and charming but also too eager to please. It was only after I’d read the book and thought about it that I wondered how much charm there was in her story.
It’s worth a read for sure for Odzer, independent of her book, makes for an interesting personality, a bit of a pioneer in the Internet world, someone who cleaned up her act once she returned to New York, went on to complete her Bachelor’s, Master’s and then her PhD at New School for Social Research. Skked, as she writes, for impending JAP-hood, she escaped her life by leaving New York and creating a new family far far away from the world she knew.
Goa the unique 