Manuel Ocampo

Quest: the Journey of the Filipino Revolution: a Poem Manuel Ocampo

This book should be read by everyone who loves freedom. It should be read by every Filipino and by anyone who has a drop of Filipino blood in him or her. Quest: the Journey of the Filipino Revolution won in 1998 the second prize for epic poetry in the literary contest launched by the Republic of the Philippines to mark the centennial of the founding of the First Filipino Republic. It tells the story of the bloody revolution waged by the Filipino people against Spanish rule and their epic struggle to defend their newly-won independence against the United States of America. It may interest the reader to note that for America to gain a semblance of legitimacy to the annexation of the Philippines, America, through the intercession of the Vatican, agreed to pay twenty million dollars to Spain for Spain's rights over the Philippines, rights that, to be sure, Spain no longer possessed. In the American campaign to subjugate the Filipinos following the signing of the treaty that formally ended the Spanish-American war, more than three million Filipinos were killed, mostly civilians of whom the great majority were women and children, "the largest single act of genocide," according to the eminent American writer Gore Vidal in the May 1975 issue of Esquire, "until Hitler."