Major earthquakes in the Maghrib (in Algeria, Orléansville/el Asnam in 1954 and 1980, or in Morocco, Agadir in 1960) figure in a number of literary works from the region, but previous scholarship focused on the metaphorical and circumstantial aspects of earthquake representations, rather than the direct relationship between writing and seismic events (Segalla, 2020). This paper integrates earthquakes into the developing fields of Maghribi ecocriticism and environmental history (Davis, 2007; Davis and Burke, 2011) by treating seismicity as a constitutive element of the mutual interactions of environment and society that, from the habitation, design, and regulation of built environments to everyday discourse and aesthetic production, defines the region’s political ecology. For literary ecocriticism drawing on the concept of language materialism, which holds that linguistic utterances become meaningful relative to their material conditions, seismicity represents both an extreme and an everyday part of Maghrebi environments. Through literary close readings of earthquake literature in tandem with historical sources, I identify language elicited by the bodily and terrestrial experience of sudden instability and uncontrolled movement that transforms shelter into exposure in an earthquake. This language, neither exclusively referential nor metaphorical persists in literature long after the event, where its diverse deployments articulate relationships between Maghribi environments and societies. I focus on Algerian writer al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār’s 1974 novel Al-Zilzāl (translated by William Granara as The Earthquake, 2000), set in seismically-unstable Constantine, between the memory of a 1947 earthquake and the premonition of an impending quake to mark the end of days. The titular earthquake, I argue, is not a specific event. It is a latent, inhuman, destructive force at the crux of the novel’s moral economy. Waṭṭār’s narration confronts two different deployments of earthquake language in its depiction of Algerian lands and bodies. The protagonist, a corrupt and violent shaykh who is seeking to insulate his properties from the upheaval of government land reform, traverses the bustling urban landscape of Constantine, encountering a diverse population he disdains. Using the register of Qur’anic eschatology (El Shakry 2019), the shaykh envisions an earthquake as divine judgment upon the city. Side by side, however, the novel incorporates as free indirect discourse the tumult of voices emanating from the jostling bodies crowding Constantine’s streets. The shaykh’s body is left literally shaking with an earthquake language that he fails to understand in relation to his environment.