Narrating Waste, Making Citizens

This article develops a corpus-assisted eco literary analysis of waste as a material and ethical structure of narrative citizenship in contemporary Arabic prose, focusing on the complete works of the Egyptian writer Muhammad Makhzangi. Trained as a physician and shaped by extended residence in the Soviet Union around the Chernobyl disaster, as well as decades of transnational travel as a journalist, Makhzangi has persistently written about contamination, exposure, multispecies vulnerability, and the infrastructures of everyday life. Yet his work remains marginal in ecocritical and ecolinguistic accounts of Arabic literature. Methodologically, the study constructs a purpose-made corpus of Makhzangi’s fiction and nonfiction and combines corpus-driven discourse analysis with close reading. The analysis centers on three recurrent lexical nodes—qumāma (garbage), nifāyāt (waste), and mukhallafāt (residues/by-products)—and traces their collocational patterns, agentive configurations, dominant verb processes, spatial frames, and sensory registers. Rather than treating these terms as interchangeable, the article shows how each organizes a distinct scale of environmental relation: Qumāma structures scenes of immediate urban and multispecies exposure; nifāyāt indexes displaced, transboundary, and often invisible harm; mukhallafāt names the delayed afterlives of industrial, scientific, and metabolic systems. Theoretically bridging waste studies, ecolinguistics, and posthuman ethics, the article argues that Makhzangi reconceptualizes citizenship not as legal belonging but as a shared condition of material exposure and uneven responsibility. In doing so, it advances “narrative citizenship of waste” as a portable framework for comparative environmental literary analysis beyond Anglophone contexts.