QUEST: the Journey of the Filipino Revolution

About the Book

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.” 

About the Author

Manuel J. Ocampo started young as a writer in the Philippines in the late 1940s and won his first literary prize for a short story from the prestigious Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. But by the time in the early 1960s when he was already established as a bilingual writer he opted to pursue a career in the corporate world, where he stayed until his retirement in 1996 as CEO of a risk management group and attorney-in-fact for an American-owned insurance company. He took up his pen again, so to speak, after that long hiatus, and wrote, first, the 1,603-line poem Quest: the Journey of the Filipino Revolution (which won in 1998 the second prize for epic poetry in the literary contest launched by the government of the Republic of the Philippines to mark the centennial of the founding of the First Filipino Republic), then the novel Lovers and Believers (which, incidentally, picks up the threads of history where Quest drops them).